Abstract

The last three decades have witnessed rising inequality and deepening financialization in post-industrial democracies. A rapidly growing literature has linked these two phenomena. We go beyond existing scholarship by specifying which aspects of financialization can be expected to increase inequality and where in the income distribution this effect will occur. We also show that this effect is contingent on institutional context. We posit that the shareholder model of corporate governance and the growing demand for financial professionals are the two dimensions of financialization that drive up pre-tax income inequality. Nevertheless, the spread of the shareholder value model only benefits the very top income earners. We further argue that the institutional strength of labor shapes the relationship between financialization and inequality. We analyze effects of indicators of these two dimensions of financialization on the top 1% and the next 9% income shares and on the 90:50 earnings ratio. We test our hypotheses with data on 18 post-industrial democracies between 1960 and 2015.

摘要

在过去的三年中，后工业民主国家的不平等现象不断加剧，金融化程度不断加深。快速增长的文献将这两种现象联系起来。我们超越了现有的学术研究，详细说明了金融化的哪些方面可以预期会增加不平等，以及这种影响会在收入分配的什么地方发生。我们还表明，这种影响取决于制度背景。我们认为，公司治理的股东模式和对金融专业人士日益增长的需求是推动税前收入不平等的金融化的两个方面。尽管如此，股东价值模型的传播只会使收入最高的人受益。我们进一步认为，劳动力的制度力量塑造了金融化和不平等之间的关系。我们分析了这两个金融化维度的指标对前 1% 和接下来 9% 的收入份额以及 90:50 的市盈率的影响。我们用 1960 年至 2015 年间 18 个后工业民主国家的数据来检验我们的假设。